The New Alphabet, Unlearning Places, HKW – Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, 10-14 January 2019 (Foto: Aya Schamoni)
Amazonian Flesh – how to hang in trees during strike?, HeK Basel 2020, Foto: Gina Folly
Amazonian Flesh – how to hang in trees during strike? Interkultur Ruhr 23-25 November 2018
The New Alphabet, Unlearning Places, HKW – Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, 10-14 January 2019
Amazonian Flesh – how to hang in trees during strike? Interkultur Ruhr 23-25 November 2018
Intervention into software company Codecentric Dortmund
Goldene Zukunft, vollautomatisiert, schwarz-weiß gemalt, Schauspielhaus Dortmund, Studio, 24 November 19h
Diskussionsabend mit Moritz Altenried (C. for Digital Cultures, Leuphana), Jochen Becker (metroZones), Manuela Bojadzijev (Leuphana, BIM), knowbotiq/Nina Bandi und Clemens Melzer (FAU)
A = anonym, Kampnagel Hamburg, 24-27 Occtober 2018, intervention in former “Meisterbude”/supervisor control room
knowbotiq in collaboration with Pablo Alarcon and Ira Wilhelm (cocoons of idleness), Nina Bandi (research, scripts), Nicolas Buzzi (sound synthesis), Anna Bromley, Joerg Franzbecker, Leila Peacock, Sally Schoenfeldt, Ian Wooldrige (voices: bots),
Fabian Saavedra-Laa/Anneke Dinkhase (Interkultur Ruhr)
Amazonian Flesh is a project by knowbotiq commissioned by Interkultur Ruhr and the research project “Reconfiguring Anonymity”, supported by Pro Helvetia, the Office of the Federal Chancellor, Austria / Art and Culture and Kulturbüro Dortmund.
Immediately after taking power the Chinese communists having decided to reinforce the numbers of the workers. They made a great many people come to the cities and the new factories. These people were so disorientated and frightened by the noise of the machines and the agitation of the workers that it was decided that for a certain period of time the newcomers would have no other task than to move freely around the workshops so as to get used to their new working conditions, to semiotise their new environment
What if the newcomers to today’s global companies decide that the almost completely automated work, which uses metadata, profiles and bots to continuously control and organize all movements and desires, could no longer be accepted at all and devote themselves completely to idleness? Could they thus begin to break the belief in wage labor as a religion?
Would they not even join the strikes of the trade unions for better working conditions to imagine new forms of refusal to work?
And hang bodies on bodies in cocoons in the trees and anonymously leave them to collective idleness?
Would the bots and the artificial intelligence of the logistical work environments also show solidarity with them?
Could such solidarity arise because those digital agents and demons are looking forward to the moment when they will do all the human work?
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Amazonian Flesh is a proliferating collective mesh of bodies, bots and digital artefacts that embraces, seduces and endangers. These cocoons of idleness are fabulations on the haptical flesh of the digital subliminal, at the zones of transsition between optimized body functions, algorithmic machines and libidinous economies.
Molecular love and uncomputability, strike 4.0.
Amazonian Flesh is reflecting the new working conditions in the logistics industry and digital economy. All movements and desires of both workers and customers are continuously recorded, evaluated and optimized. The boundaries between body and digital infrastructures get blurred in a constantly changing matrix of value creation. If one does not perform at their best, their employment contract will not be extended. The federal state of NRW as the leading logistics location in Germany: in autumn 2017 Amazon’s new distribution centre has been opened on the site of the former Westfalenhütte (steel mill) in Dortmund. The intention is to create new jobs, especially for the long-term unemployed and workers (many with a migrant background) in temporary employment agencies.
